Inside Bari Weiss’s hostile takeover of CBS News

On Halloween, a production team from “60 Minutes,” CBS’s flagship news program, went to Mar-a-Lago for an interview that the correspondent Norah O’Donnell was conducting with Donald Trump. It was the President’s first appearance on the network since filing a lawsuit against it, claiming that, in the run-up to the 2024 election, “60 Minutes” had unfairly edited an interview with his opponent Kamala Harris. Most observers agreed that the suit had little merit, but CBS’s parent company, Paramount, which was owned by the Redstone family, had agreed to pay Trump sixteen million dollars to settle the matter. At the time, the media mogul David Ellison was in the process of acquiring Paramount, an eight-billion-dollar deal that required the Administration’s approval. “I see good things happening in the news,” Trump now told O’Donnell. “I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership—CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”

Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, was watching the interview off camera. Just a few years earlier, she had resigned from her position as an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, condemning the paper as doctrinally liberal and out of touch. She went on to start a Substack that would eventually become The Free Press, an anti-woke rejoinder to a mainstream media that, Weiss argued, pandered to an audience of élites who were “turning against America.” Fox News and MSNBC were feeding their audiences “political heroin,” she said. Elsewhere, she added, “I think there’s a lot of people in this country who are politically homeless, who feel like the old labels—Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal—no longer fit them or no longer mean what they used to.”